Hormel Bacon & Pork Sausage

When I found these Hormel Bacon & Pork Sausages at Price/Rite for 99 cents, I had to try them out.  I could tell from the picture on the box that they probably wouldn't be very good - casingless sausage generally is pretty nasty stuff - but after all, I was only gambling a buck.

Since my expectations were pretty low, I wasn't too disappointed when I opened the box and found a block of bulk sausage meat that had been die cut to form "links."  Except they're not links, Hormel. If they're not packed in casing and linked together, they're not links.  Believe it or not, the picture here actually makes the sausage look better than it did in real life. They were lumpy and loosely formed, and the surface was white with congealed fat.

They were some ugly-looking meat sticks after frying. Several of them broke apart as they cooked because the meat was packed too loosely to hold together. And, of course, there was all that fat.

The flavor was...unique. Vaguely porky, a faint whiff of smokiness from the bacon, and an overwhelmingly cloying flavor of fake maple flavoring. I took a bite of one and that was all I could take. Luckily, the dogs thought the sausage was awesome and that 99-cent box of cheap meat gave me a day's worth of treats for Zim and Iris.

There is nothing worse than fake maple flavoring. I hate the way it tastes, but I hate the way it smells even more. It reeks like boiled-over automotive antifreeze, and it lingers forever. The stink of it hung in the house for days. Fortunately, feeding the "links" to the dogs made them fart, which covered the smell. 

Out Of The Can: Bacon Grill Luncheon Loaf

Bacon Grill Luncheon Loaf is a dollar-store SPAM knockoff that is perhaps the worst-tasting homogeneous tinned meat product that I have ever tasted. The photo doesn't really do it justice, because it fails to show its true, vividly pink color/ Popped out of the can as shown, it looks very much like it was made of melted pink crayon topped with transparent Jell-O.

Sliced and fried, it developed a nicely browned crust which is probably the best thing I'm going to say about it. The texture was spongy and unpleasant, and it tasted like the cheapest, most filler-laden bologna you can imagine.

Really horrible. I might eat it again if I were starving. No, literally starving, not just "wicked hungry" starving.

Pillsbury Simply Rustic French Bread / Salami Bread

If you've ever had any of the various Pillsbury "bread" doughs, you've probably noticed that they all taste pretty much the same. Dinner rolls, crescent rolls, "Italian" bread, Rustic French bread, biscuits, you name it - Pillsbury does some pretty amazing things with textures (varying the flakiness of the rolls and making some of the breads denser than others, for example) but when you get right down to it and taste it, the basic flavor is identical right across the line.

So you can probably imagine that I didn't have very high expectations for Pillsbury Rustic French Bread. I don't care what the advertising says or how attractive the picture on the package is. It's still going to taste like something out of a bursting paper tube.  And I was right. Totally unimpressive - you can get the same effect from not separating a bunch of dinner rolls and baking them in one long cylinder. Not "rustic" at all, and certainly not "French."

And therefore, for my second tube of Rustic French Bread, I thought I'd try something different. I make salami, pepperoni, and sausage breads all the time (using genuine yeast bread from a fairly standard yeast bread recipe) and somehow I got it into my head that maybe the rather "meh" Pillsbury Rustic French Bread could be made better by going beyond the usual.

I started out by removing the Pillsbury dough from the tube and spreading it out on a work surface.  I found that Simply dough is every bit as sticky as non-Simply Pillsbury stuff, so I spread it out on a sheet of baking parchment.

With the dough spread out, I added a single layer of Genoa salami. and then rolled the dough up into a loaf with the salami spiraled in the middle.

Here's the dough, all rolled up with a few slashes cut into it for venting.  I transferred the loaf onto a baking sheet and put it into the oven.

And here's the final product, out of the oven all nicely browned and looking totally nommable.

You know what it tasted like? Cheap and crappy Pillsbury dough with salami inside. It was really lousy.

I dunno. Pillsbury's quick breads certainly have their place - I enjoy the dinner rolls and "biscuits" occasionally. But I guess I'm just less than enthusiastic about using Pillsbury breads for stuff like "rustic French bread" or pizza dough.

Eggies Hard Boiled Egg Cooker

Check out this ad for a product called "Eggies."  Apparently, their target market is "People Who Don't Mind Being Called Too Stupid To Peel An Egg."

Assorted Mexican Candy

Left to right: Duvalin, Pica Fresa, Mangopers lollipops

So, the other day I made this huge mistake and bought an assortment of Mexican candy from T J Maxx.  It didn't seem like it would be such a bad idea - didn't look all that bad, and the ingredients promised spicy chile peppers!  (Yes, I have a weakness for hot spice, and the spice/sweet combo was just very appealing.)

Unfortunately, the three candies I brought home became the Trifecta of Disappointment.

Duvalin Bi Sabor Strawberry-Vanilla is advertised as a "cream candy." It comes in little tubs, with little plastic sticks to aid consumption.  The closest I can come to describing it is "cheap frosting."  It was exactly as if I had bought little sample containers of pre-made cake frosting.  This, of course, is not unheard of in North American supermarkets (Betty Crocker makes Dunkaroos, which are nothing but a small serving of cookies and a tiny tub of frosting to dunk them in. But at least there are cookies there to somewhat cut the frosting jolt.)  Knowing that Duvalin Bi Sabor is so frostingesque should tell you just about all you need to know about it.  I can't really condemn it - there are plenty of people who would just love the stuff - but I kind of expected something more along the lines of a taffy, so there ya go.

Pica Fresa are little balls of individually wrapped starch gum rolled in "hot" chili powder. They taste kind of like what you'd get if you coated Twizzlers in cayenne pepper (but took away much of the heat.)  They would have been better if they were hotter. And a little chewier.

Mangopers mango flavored lollipops were the absolute worst of the bunch, by a huge margin, given their utter horridness. They appeared to be made of mango-flavored hard candy coated in ground chile pepper, but honestly, I'll never know. The coating was so nasty - the stalest possible chile powder seemingly blended with a heavy dose of salt - that I never even made it to the candy within.  Truly bad stuff.

Never again.

What...the...HELL??

This was in the markdown bin at Stop & Shop - presumably because one of them was missing, and not because textured cock-shaped rubber toys are slow sellers.

The illustration on the box doesn't even make an attempt at subtlety.

WTF Underwear

The cheeseburger makes this food-related, OK?

Found at the Haynes outlet store in Kittery, Maine:  Women's underwear with "cheesy" printed on the crotch.  No one was buying them.

Cheap Parmesan

Since they're mixing it with "cheese whey" I suspect that the Imported Parmesan Laubscher is selling might not be imported from Italy.

Cheez-It Horror

I poured out some Cheez-Its (the Four Cheese variety) onto a plate and this lump dropped out with it.  It's the largest of a number of cheese amalgam chunks I've found in the box. Properly dusted on the crackers it tastes okay, but in massive chunk form, it's rather disgusting.

Let's have a bit more quality control, eh Keebler?

Corned Beef Fail

Local readers get three guesses at which Longmeadow MA supermarket sold me this inedibly-fatty USDA Grade Shit corned beef.

Please don't tell me that corned beef is supposed to be fatty.  I took these slices from the leanest part of the cut, and this is the fat left after braising it in the oven all damn day.

Boulder Canyon Spinach & Artichoke Potato Chips

It's kind of funny how this works - the very idea of a "spinach and artichoke" flavored potato chip is just so repellent to me that I would never have even briefly considered buying this product had I run into it in a regular supermarket.  And yet, the same flavor, found as a remaindered item that the store is trying to dump, piques my interest enough that I drop a bag in my cart.  I guess it's just morbid curiosity.  After all, just how bad does a flavor have to be to get the price slashed to less than a third of the original ticket?  How desperate does a store have to be to mark a product down so low in hopes of recovering some bit - some tiny fraction - of the money they paid to put this on the shelf?

In this case, pretty bad.

The chips don't smell very much like spinach or artichoke.  They smell like garlic powder and dried sour cream, and some kind of powdered cheese, which is what a lot of flavored potato chips smell like these days. You wouldn't be able to tell from looking at the chips that they have any kind of vegetable flavorings at all, since there's no evidence of spinach or artichokes other than the very sparse occasional bit of dark green fleck on them which could be parsley or nori or green magic marker for all I could see.

And they don't taste much like spinach or artichoke, either.  Remember that garlicy sour creamy cheesy smell I described?  That's pretty much what they tasted like, too. Garlic, onion, a hint of sour cream, a bit of Parmesan cheese, but damn little artichoke or spinach.  Maybe they were going for the taste of dip?  I dunno, but they weren't very good and after the opened bag sat around for three or four days without being touched after the initial tasting, I took the family's hint and pitched 'em in the bin.  And nothing of value was lost.

Fruit 2 O Essentials

Fruit ₂O Essentials is a bottled soft drink that just pisses me off on so many levels.

Just the name, for example.  "Fruit ₂ O."  It's annoying to have to use fancy HTML tags to make a subscript "2" all the time.  Every time I have to type "Fruit ₂ O" it's like another little droplet of H₂O plinking upon my forehead in some bizarre sort of water torture.

Then there's the flavors.  There's some weird stuff going on there.  The flavor is listed on the label in bright white letters - like "Cranberry Raspberry" for example - and then, under that in tiny little letters just a shade lighter than the background ribbon, it says, "Natural Flavor With Other Natural Flavor."  What the hell is that all about?  "Yo, dawg, we heard you like fruitiness so we put flavor in your flavor so you can taste while you taste."

Something else about the labels piss me off, too.  They have big luscious pictures of fruit on the labels, and under it - again in big white lettering "2 servings of fruit."  Only when you turn the bottle and look closer might you notice that the banner actually says, "5 nutrients equal to 2 servings of fruit."  Holy shit, the scientists at Fruit ₂ O have determined the ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS in fruit so they can declare their sucralose-water equivalent to eating the real thing.   And then they narrowed the list down to 5. That's some badass hardcore science there.  It should be in capital letters: SCIENCE.  Well, maybe not real science.  Fruit ₂ O is, after all, made by the Sunny D guys - the same company that pays supermarkets to display Sunny D in the refrigerated orange juice section of the store so people will think it's good for you - so my guess is that the "science" involved mostly thinking about how to get people to part with a couple of bucks for a few ounces of sweetened, colorfully dressed water.

And last of all, there's something about the chemical stew they stir into the brew that just dries the back of my throat out whenever I drink it.  Never fails to make me want to cough and clear my throat, whether I'm drinking a couple of swallows or chugging  a whole bottle.

I'm kinda sorry I wasted money on this stuff.  Fail from top to bottom.

My Heinous Turducken

Not everything that I make is an unqualified success.  Last weekend, for example, I put together a turducken for a big family dinner.  A turducken, you may know, is a medieval-style feast of poultry - a chicken stuffed within a duck, stuffed within a turkey, each of the birds having been carefully boned and layered with bread dressings.  It was a lot of work, and required a lot of resources, and when it was all said and done, I was less than happy with the results.  Oh, the family and friends gathered around the table thought it was fine.  I just didn't think it measured up to my customary standards.

This turducken came about because of a marvelous alignment of events.  I had originally planned a simple turkey dinner featuring a bird I had purchased and frozen a few months ago.  A day or so into the thawing cycle, I was at Stop & Shop and found a plump duck on sale - a Manager's Special - for less than half the normal price.  I took that duck home with visions of Five Spice Crispy Duck dancing in my head.  Only after getting the duck home and placing it in the fridge next to the turkey did the thought of turducken cross my mind.

And so it was that on Saturday morning, I made up three large batches of stuffing: one of traditional sage-and-onion, one of cornbread, and a third with sausage.  On Saturday afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table with a sharp boning knife and got to work on the poultry, removing all of the bones from the chicken and duck, and all but the wings and leg bones from the turkey.  I guess the idea is to have the finished turducken look like a regular stuffed turkey.  It doesn't quite work out like that, though - without a ribcage in there supporting the exterior, my turducken looked less like a stuffed turkey and more like a very pale obese midget had been beheaded, hogtied, and dropped into my roasting pan.  It weighed a bit more than 38 pounds.

The next morning, with all the stuffing and trussing done, I stabbed a couple of temperature probes into the frankenbird and slid it into a 300F oven, covering the roaster to prevent the meat from drying out during what I figured to be an eight-plus hour cooking time.

It did, indeed, take eight-plus hours.  Closer to nine.  And despite my best efforts - low heat, covering the roaster for most of the cooking time, frequent basting - the turkey still came out dry.  At a couple of places, the skin had burst and allowed stuffing to leak out and slowly harden in the heat of the oven.  The outside quarter-inch of turkey had been dessicated into turkey jerky, and the thin meat around the lower legs and cavity were mummified.

Luckily, my family was pretty understanding, especially my mother (the veteran of no few culinary disasters of her own) and still willing to give the final product a try. 

As I cut slices from the monster, it became clear that this turducken was really no worse than any of the others that people have photographed for the Web.  And, although the outermost bits of turkey were dry to the point of inedibility, it improved somewhat towards the duck layer.

While I thought of it as only a marginal success (if that) the other diners were pleased.  I attribute that not to the turducken, but to the deliciousness of the peripherals - the stuffings, helped along by fat and juices from the chicken and duck skins, were stellar and simmering the bones from the birds for so many hours yielded an awesome stock to make gravy.

I think if I ever make a turducken again, it will be a much less bothersome version.  I will use only the breasts of the various fowl and pound them out flat before layering them with the stuffings and rolling them up into the form of a normal rolled roast, tying it the same way.  The roasting time will be much shorter, the prep will be easier (much more like rolling and tying a pork belly for pancetta) and everyone will still get lovely slices of turkey, duck, chicken, and stuffings.

Campbell's Chicken Wonton Soup

This is not a wonton.

I got a call from Lynnafred yesterday.  She had just opened up a can of Campbell's Chicken Wonton Soup that she'd bought on impulse the other day.

"Dad, this soup is horrible.  Why did you let me buy it?"

I only accept part of the blame for this, however.  Although there are several Campbell's soups that we buy regularly, none of the chicken varieties are on our list because they're so nasty.  Campbell's chicken broth is just horrible - it's heavy and artificial-tasting and the doughy noodles they throw in only makes it worse.  It stands to reason that Chicken Wonton would be no better.

There were five small "wontons" in the can, each of them a thick pentagonal chunk of noodle with a tiny dab of meatlike stuff near the center.  She ended up dividing the soup between the dogs who, predictably, enjoyed the hell out of it.

More Ridiculous Hanukkah Advertising

Stop & Shop says Happy Chanukah!  Celebrate by cooking a delicious fresh pork shoulder, on sale now for just 99 cents a pound!

Steaz Organic Teaz

Anytime something is spelled wrong on a label, I get thinking.  I wonder why the hell people can't spell things normally, for starters. And I never think "Hey, that's really clever," no, I usually consider pluralizing with a z or spelling things with an initial K instead of  C to be an irritatingly cutesy (if not plain stupid) marketing gimmick for something that probably sucks.

Allow me to present Steaz Organic Iced Teaz.

Steaz bottled teas are usually pretty good, for the record. I'm not talking about Teaz® here, I'm talking about the plural of the word tea. I've had their regular black tea and it's been good, and the white tea is good enough that I don't ask myself why I didn't make my own damn tea, but as soon as they're slapping pictures of happy tea farmers on the can and adding fruit to it, something happens. It gets nasty.

Steaz Organic Fruit Teaz come in six varieties: Green tea with Blueberry Pomegranate Acai, Green Tea with Peach, Black Tea with Lemon, and White tea with Pomegranate and Lime, unsweetened Green Tea with Lemon, and Green Tea with Mint. I'll be reviewing the first four here, because that's all I could find.

Where do I even start? I'll start with Green Tea Peach. The flavor was certainly that of green tea, but Dave and I found only the barest hint of peach flavor to it. Dave actually described it as, "Like someone walked a peach by it." And that's fairly accurate. The peach flavor was there, but it was more of an "essence" than a real "flavor." My mother, on the other hand, thought that it was "very peachy." She also likes things more subtly flavored than Dave and I, so maybe we're just the wrong market for theze Teaz.

The Green Tea with Blueberry Pomegranate Acai wasn't much better.  There was the typical green tea astringency with a vague fruit flavor there, but the blueberry and pomegranate flavors just sort of muddied each other together without letting either of them be distinct enough to really enjoy.  Acai might have been in the mix, but it was indistinguishable.

Next up was the White Tea with Pomegranate and Lime. My friend Jess was over when I cracked this one open, and I let her take the first sip of it. She described it as "Gymbag Tea." This time, the White Tea's natural flavor was overpowered by a flavor reminiscent of dirt, artificial limes, and something kind of soapy. It was such a completely nasty tea that I ended up dumping  it out, and nothing of value was lost. Everyone in the house who tried it had the same expression on their face: ( ﾟдﾟ)

The best of the ones we found was the Black Tea with Lemon, but even this was flawed.  The lemon flavor was completely out of proportion with the tea, and it tasted more like a blend of lemonade and tea than a tea flavored with lemon.  Props for the tea not being heavily sweetened - there was just a touch of "evaporated cane juice" to take the sharp edges off the lemon and tea, but not enough to make a sickly-sweet Liptonesque concoction - but otherwise still not what I was expecting.


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Herr's Baby Back Ribs Potato Chips

On the one hand, I have to hand it to Herr's for their incessant development of unique and interesting potato chip flavors.

On the other hand, the Baby Back Ribs flavor is just so...not good that it's no wonder I found them in a job lot store.

When all is said and done, they are a very ordinary barbecue flavor potato chip with the addition of something called "grill flavor."  They don't really tate like baby back ribs unless you have a fairly active imagination.

I won't be buying these again.

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Frito Lay Dumps The Sun Chips Compostable Bag

Eighteen months ago, Frito Lay introduced the world's first 100% compostable snack bag, and used it to market Sun Chips.  I thought it was a good idea at the time, but mentioned how LOUD the bags were.

Well apparently, snackers around the country began complaining about the noisy bags almost immediately, and many of them have expressed their displeasure with the bags by not buying Sun Chips any more.

Faced with the drop in sales and consumer complaints, Frto Lay announced today that the compostable bags have acheived MARKETING FAIL and will be discontinued.

I hope another use can be found for the compostable material, because I like the idea of packaging not helping to top off landfills.  And I should note that the bags that we threw in our compost pile did indeed return earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

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Organic Valley Vanilla Soy Milk

When I was drinking Organic Valley Vanilla Soy Milk I had to keep looking in my cup to make sure I was acutally drinking soy milk and not sipping liquified chalk. 

And yet, the taste was totally nostalgic.  Bear with me.

How's it goin'?

I am an Old Kid, and back in my day you young hoodlum we had a medicine called Kaopectate.  You may have heard of it.  You may have even seen it on the shelves of your favorite drugstore or supermarket.  But the Kaopectate of today is not the Kaopectate of my misspent youth.  Back then, Kaopectate was made of clay.

You heard me.  That's how it got the name - from the active ingredients.  Kao = kaolin (a type of clay) and pectate = pectin.  I guess the idea was to get you to eat a load of clay to soak up the extra buttjuice. They also used to put some kinds of flavoring in there, too, so it wouldn't taste so clayish.

I still remember the flavor of Kaopectate's original formula.  And when I drank that Organic Valley Vanilla Soy Milk, I was hit with a wave of nostalgia, because the soy milk tastes 100% exactly like old school Kaopectate.

Bottoms up!
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Banquet's Cheesy Smothered Charbroiled Patty Revisited

Almost exactly a year ago, I reviewed Banquet's Cheesy Smothered Meat Patty Meal.  It was, and remains, one of the worst things I have ever eaten.  Whenever I see them in the supermarket, I still can't believe that there is such a demand for them that they're still produced.

But they are.  And apparently, they are so popular that Banquet also packages them in a "Family Size" - six patties smothered in "cheesy" sauce.  Damn.  Six of those would be like six lifetime supplies of them for me.

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